Ransen's Blog

The third verse of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam goes like this: And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before The Tavern shouted--"Open then the Door! You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more." It is one of the poems I'm learning by heart. (Not the whole thing, it is far too long, but the first few verses.)  Awake my little ones and fill the cup... Anyway the second line has, to me, a sort of tension: "Open then the Door!" Because it would be more natural to say say " open the Door then " but that would not rhyme. So " then" is put in the "wrong" place... "Open then the Door!" ...and gives me pleasure. It happens in other rhyming poems. And I noticed that I get the same feeling of tension when playing backgammon. If you don't know anything about backgammon you can go to Wikipedia. Like poker it is a game of ...

I saw the flower of the melissa plant on my balcony and fell in love with the curves. The flowers die pretty quickly and the one I wanted to look at with my Veho was a poor shriveled up thing by the time I got round to it. Luckily others had blossomed in the meantime, but even then it took me a while to find one which matched my inital impression. Here are the first attempts, the width of each of these photos is about 1cm. Then I found her: A tiny thing but leaping up out of the green with a hairy tongue sticking out and a smaller spiral one almost hidden within the mouth. Ah, those curves, those curves... especially the upper one going up at more than 45° then sloping over towards the mouth. Is it just me?